To my way of thinking my point is radically democratic, and the farthest thing from counter-revolutionary. The openness I am talking about, the futurity inhering in the present, in the presented diversity of peers to peers, is the space of possible freedom itself in my view.

"The Future" which we encounter in flat-footed science fiction, in breathless pop futurism, in suave corporate-militarist scenario-building, in manic promotional discourse and advertising, in self-actualization guru spiels, in hyperbolic pharmaceutical and biotech and media-gizmo press releases is always just an amplification of anxieties, fears, desires TODAY masquerading as a conjuration of TOMORROW.

For more, Roland Barthes Mythologies is indispensable reading in my view -- especially his very short essays on Jules Verne, "The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat," and on "Plastic."

My understanding of revolutionary politics is informed by what I take to be a real transformation of revolutionary praxis through the nonviolence of Gandhi and King (and many more) as well as the resigned violence of Fanon, and especially by the account of politics scattered among the books of Hannah Arendt (more here). I believe the classic Revolutionaries, the professional Revolutionaries have tended opportunistically to glom onto insurrectionary eruptions and then seek to dominate, domesticate, and typically altogether kill the democratizing energies they unleashed in the service of a parochial ideologically-correct vision of revolution with which they happen to identify (usually the result of swallowing some pseudo-economic sophisms). The professional revolutionary is always a self-appointed avant-gardist, and right there is the authoritarian kernel that has throttled back every Revolution but America's (the key to which, I believe, is the genius not of the Declaration, but of the Constitution, that unsettling settlement that set us on the path of interminable democratizing reformism and experimentalism) -- which is not to say that I have forgotten or disagree with Lenin's critique of the fantasy of spontaneism.

"The Future," so-called, is the functional closure of futurity, it is the political price the futurologist inevitably pays for his alliance with incumbent interests (the "utopian" amplification of whose terms he designates as "The Future" in the first place), that is to say, for his parochial post-human dis-identification with the diversity of actual and wanted and flourishing human lifeways in the present world whose collaboration and contestation open the futurity always inhering in the present, peer-to-peer.

It is an interesting exercise, by the way, to substitute for the word "futurologist" in that sentence the word "economist": to do so is to go a long way toward understanding the havoc wreaked by the circumvention and even attempted dis-invention of Keynesian macroeconomics by the devastating ascendancy of the crypto-feudalist pseudo-economic sophisms of Hayek and Friedman (Mises, Hazlitt, and even La Rand also have places at this ignominious table). In a book like the flabbergastingly false and fantastically facile The Long Boom by Peter Schwartz and a few other exemplary mainstream neoliberal futurologists the inextricability of reactionary politics (incumbency as meritocracy, eg), spontaneist figuration (self-regulating markets as spontaneous order, eg), and the futurological form (technofixes to infinity and beyond, eg) compels attention to how thoroughly not only the argumentative framework for our present distress depends on interdependent market justifications and futurological promises, but how the style of our epoch attests as well to this interdependence: the immaterialism of neoliberal financialization and logo-ization of the economy finds its consummation in the digital utopianism of futurological discourse, the hyperbole and fraud that suffuses the marketing and promotional discursive motor of the corporate-militarist order finds its consummation in the literally techno-transcendentalizing aspirations of superlative futurology.

Do futurist visions differ so completely from traditional leftist dreams a better society?

Oh, my heavens, yes. Every commercial on television roars with the infantile demand for MORE! Futurologists handwaving about how awesome superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance would be, will be, must be are little more than greedy consumer appetites writ large, squalling ids clothing their infantilism in the techno-whizbang they sell themselves and seek to sell others as science (to the cost of real science and sensible policy).

Me, me, me, mine, mine, mine, munch, munch, munch! Can you really not discern the difference between such squalid tantrums and the democratizing work to implement ever greater equity in diversity, ever more informed and ever less duressed consent, to enable ever more people with ever more of a say in the decisions that affect them?

Boner pill press releases and annual declarations that a space hotel and a conscious computer are in the works (in just twenty years at most!) aren't the same thing as radical manifestos for heaven's sake. Every fast-talking grifter with some granny's scarcely ever driven used car and every priest peddling a pastel-hued hereafter is an avatar of the Revolutionary Spirit if the cybernetic-totalists, comicbook-eugenicists, techno-immortalists, and nano-cornucopiasts of the Robot Cult are to be so garlanded.

The eerily static Drexlerian and Vingean tableaux Robot Cultists have been handwaving about for generations now are unspeakably shabby impoverished straightjacketed things compared to the open futurity inhering in the present, peer to peer, the collaboratory and contestatory making and re-making of the shared public world every today of which already viscerally aspires toward such tomorrows as have any reality at all.

Every futurism is a retro-futurism, every futurological prospect is shaped by the nostalgia and anxieties and brutalizing greed of some parochial and defensive or aggressive inhabitation of the present. "The Future" is always some parochial present amplified and expanded into the openness of presence, its futurity, closing it off for itself, filling it up with itself. In one especially poignant example, notice that what the Robot Cultists like to peddle as the "acceleration of accelerating change" is little but the abject precarity of neoliberal financialization of the economy in a neoconservative hail of bullets, as described from the vantage of the relative beneficiaries of that horror or those who shabbily and selfishly with those beneficiaries.

There is nothing remotely revolutionary or even progressive in the circus barkery of the superlative futurologists and their Robot Cult (indeed, there is little that is progressive in many progressivisms, to the extent that they function as naturalizing apologiae for the self-indulgent elitism of the self-appointed elites).

There is no question that the technoscientific address of shared human problems is indispensable. But when the Robot Cultists confuse science fiction with either science proper or science policy, as well as when they champion at once reductive and triumphalist scientism, they indulge in distortions and derangements and debaucheries of science quite as dreadful as the Know Nothings of fundamentalist religiosity and the frauds and corruption of incumbent interests. Only a consensus science confined to its proper precinct in a secular multiculture, directed by democratically deliberative technodevelopment to ensure its costs, risks, and benefits are distributed equitably to the diversity of its stakeholders can properly be said to be emancipatory.

I would argue that we have already long since arrived at a technoscientific level such that we could technically emancipate all living human beings by way of a universal basic income guarantee, universal health care and life-long access to reliable knowledge and education. I agree with Walter Benjamin that we have diverted our technique into the war machine lest that available emancipation obliterate the hierarchies cherished by those who benefit from them, just as I agree with Guy Debord (and, later, Naomi Klein) that we have diverted likewise our technique into a war against the living earth to render that emancipation unavailable in spite of ourselves, while diverting our attentions to the pseudo-needs of phony lifestyle-individuation lest that still-available emancipation from the actual needs of life we all share obliterate the hierarchies cherished by those few who reside at their summits.

I want to live in a society in which people have a real say in the public decisions that affect them (my definition of democracy), in which people can consent in an informed and nonduressed way (which requires access to education and reliable knowledge and certified professions as well as equal recourse to the law and freedom from the fear of violence, penury, and undue harm) as to the cultural-prosthetic terms of their self-determination. I want to live in a working secular sustainable social democracy with public welfare and education and healthcare, funded through the progressive taxation of income, including investment income, and property. I want the institutions of global governance that already exist to be democratized and health education and welfare to be planetary entitlements. I think the planetary perspective of globe-girdling network formations and the global character of environmental, weapons proliferation, and poverty politics are already enabling such transformations.

Action as presence always reverberates with historicity and aspires as an openness onto elsewhere and otherwise. Everything emancipatory attributed to "The Future" has been stolen from the openness and potential inhering in the futurity in presence: stolen the better to be substituted with some crassly amplified incumbent parochialism peddled as "The Future."

The social struggle for greater democracy over authoritarian incumbency, the implementation of a scene of ever more informed, ever less duressed consent, the provision of equity in the face of the ongoing reconciliation of the diverse aspiration of our peers, the assertive judgments and expressivities offered up to the judgments of our fellows all together delineate the promise and problems of freedom as it presents itself in the present, peer to peer, provide the substance of open futurity in the living public world.

17 comments:

I would argue that we have already long since arrived at a technoscientific level such that we could technically emancipate all living human beings by way of a universal basic income guarantee, universal health care and life-long access to reliable knowledge and education.

I agree completely and mention this as often as I can. The technocracy movement thought we could do this for the North American continent in 1920s; William Morris thought it would be feasible a few decades earlier. There's no need to wait for genies and mints to enact transformation. As you would expect, I haven't received any support from my fellow transhumanists with this line of reasoning.

My understanding of revolutionary politics is informed by what I take to be a real transformation of revolutionary praxis through the nonviolence of Gandhi and King (and many more) as well as the resigned violence of Fanon, and especially by the account of politics scattered among the books of Hannah Arendt

While I typically treat King and Gandhi with the customary reverence, there's plenty to criticize about their political visions. Arundhati Roy, for example, does this well with the latter. If they're the tradition you most align with, I can see how you would miss the resonances I perceive between transhumanism and radical dreams of the new society.

I study anarchism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so unsurprisingly that era has influenced and inspired my own revolutionary orientation. Highlights include Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, and Ricardo Flores Magón (despite his belief in violence and homophobia). We anarchists are compelled by our values to contemplate drastically different modes of social organization. Flores Magón's propaganda (I employ the word as used at the time) provide countless explorations of life without the state, bourgeoisie, or clergy. He sketched out scenes of free cooperation between agriculture and industry informed by the ever-expanding scientific understand of the world. Desire see this possible future was coded as the core of revolutionary motivation; it appears as a luminous sun in party artwork. Other leftists didn't necessarily approve; Eugene Debs dismissed the PLM's anarchism as fantasy. See, we're used to that reaction.

Besides the anarchist tradition, I draw on Firestone for guidance. By my interpretation she was/is a transhumanist. Her plan centered on appropriating technology to liberate women from reproduction and everyone from drudgery. The possible of human-level artificial intelligence she accepted casually. That's the direction I would like the present transhumanist movement to take. If you consider Firestone profoundly revolutionary, as I do, then in theory nothing prevents futurism from shifting to the same alignment. If you reject her use of the future as an ideal, then we've got something else to argue about.

With regards to revolutions in practice, I tend to agree with assessment aside from the American exceptionalism. If nothing else, anarchism deserves credit for predicting the horrors of state communism. Why you try to characterize the American Revolution as the best example of the phenomenon, however, is beyond me. I'd look to Cuba before I'd look here, and I'm no cheerleader for Fidel or Che.

Can you really not discern the difference between such squalid tantrums and the democratizing work to implement ever greater equity in diversity, ever more informed and ever less duressed consent, to enable ever more people with ever more of a say in the decisions that affect them?

As I wrote and you neglected to quote here, "The political content strikes me as easy enough to manipulate." There's important difference in the way transhumanist talk about the future that you're glossing over. Kurzweil, for example, tends to present the Singularity as an inevitability that will simply unfold regardless of our actions. There's nothing revolutionary about that notion, though it may still be correct. Others, such as Yudkowsky, speak instead of choosing to create and use technologies to solve the world's problems. That is revolutionary thinking and could be enormously beneficial if combined with a radical social vision.

I can see how you would miss the resonances I perceive between transhumanism and radical dreams of the new society.

Yowling "I don't want to die!" and "I want more!" isn't new, it isn't radical, it isn't interesting -- saying "technology" in a construal so general as to be vacuous will spit out a toypile to Tech Heaven is just a slightly amplified variation on the irresponsible consumerism and technofix distrations of the corporate-militarist status quo. My refusal to fall for the Robot Cult scam has nothing to do with my appreciation for the contributions of nonviolent activism to the revolutionary tradition.

I don't mean to denigrate Firestone -- but honestly there is quite a lot more out there for you to draw from. Read STS (science and technology studies) and EJ (environmental justice critique) -- much of it is very current, diverse, politically engaged, technoscientifically literate and concerned. The Robot Cultists are a cul de sac, full of silly boys, you are ready for something far more interesting and relevant.

More recent than the technocrats -- the basic income movement, single payer healthcare advocacy, p2p and a2k political theorists (peer to peer and access to knowledge) are a more living constituency for these aspirations -- there are some great conjunctions among the EJ folks and a2k folks and ecosocialists. No need to join a weird privileged white-boy Robot Cult full of apologists for extractive-industrial-broadcast formations peddling consumer heaven among True Believers.

"Others, such as Yudkowsky, speak instead of choosing to create and use technologies to solve the world's problems. That is revolutionary thinking and could be enormously beneficial if combined with a radical social vision."

I'm afraid I don't understand what's the slightest bit revolutionary about this. Not even a hint. There are old men who can barely use a cell phone saying the same thing. What is the alternative? NOT using technological advances to try and solve real problems? The way you've presented this, everyone is sitting on their hands except the techno-utopian folks who had the brilliant idea to use "technology" (whatever that means) to make the world better. A hominid in a cave had this idea, not some white kid playing with robots.

Let me see if I've got this queer. You reject transhumanist similarities to revolutionary dreamers on the basis that the technologies required to implement their vision are impossible and because they lean strongly toward conservatism. Is that correct?

The charge of impossibility applies equally to anarchism and radical feminism. I've heard it a thousand times. Our ideals of social transformation exist in the same unproven space as Aubrey de Grey's quest for rejuvenation therapy.

The other allegation carries considerably more weight. Identifying myself with a group famous for privilege, elitism, and market worship doesn't exactly sound wise when view in those terms. I'm trying to bring a leftist revolutionary perspective to the movement and (re)claim transhumanism for such ends, but that's perhaps a waste of time.

The way you've presented this, everyone is sitting on their hands except the techno-utopian folks who had the brilliant idea to use "technology" (whatever that means) to make the world better.

Then I've presented it wrong. It's matter of ambition and degree. Transhumanist ethics favor freedom to modify the body. As anarchist reject social limitations, transhumanists deny biological ones. The best example would be aging. Despite what Dale claims, plenty of folks at least say they would oppose rejuvenation therapy if it were real. Transhumanists consider the goal desirable and plausible enough to be worth pursuing. As far as meaningful present-day issues go, transhumanism supports sex reassignment surgery and reproductive rights. The mindset lends itself to skepticism of established boundaries.

The affirmation of radical change regardless of dismissal resonates with me as an anarchist. As Firestone began her book, people respond to the notion of abolishing the gender distinction by saying, "That? You can't change that." When I talk of getting rid of bosses, cops, and prisons I get the same reaction. That's the connection I see and what binds me to transhumanism. A proper synthesis of transhumanist and leftist revolutionary values should lead to what Dale mentioned about the basic income movement as a start.

Feminist/queer transsex-intersex politics are leaps and bounds ahead of the tired formulations of Robot Cultists who substitute facile neologisms for sustained engagements, compare George Dvorsky's radical "post-genderism" so-called (about which I have written a word or two, "'Post-Gender' or Gender Poets") with critical race/lgbtiqq critique of the last decade before you crow too hard about the Brave New World of 80s/90s retread transhumanesque-types... Speaking of "meaningful," I see Martine Rothblatt is comparing herself to Gandhi and Douglas again (who were struggling, by the way, for the rights of actual human beings) to free "mindclones" from their humiliation and bondage to their haters despite their, you know, nonexistence and nonsensicality -- fight the good fight, Robot Cultists! It's not like anybody could be devoting their attentions to injustices elsewhere these days, after all.

By the way, I also do happen to think it is silly to imagine we can altogether overcome some kind of police-function, even if it is constrained to maintaining the bounds of an institutional recourse for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes. I want to further democratize, not to smash the state. Also, I think the sex-gender system is an agentic vocabulary the terms of which are re-invigorated through both their citation but also through certain subversive mis-citations that can render them more capacious. Dreams of "abolishing" the distinction rather than recognizing its already multiple-fragmentary character and the capacities inhering in it for elaboration otherwise seem to me a cheap cop-out, frankly; read Judith Butler, hell, read Valerie Solanas. Maybe you are right after all in drawing these connections between the infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies of Robot Cultists and a politics of state-smashing and post-gender declarations -- I can't say that I find much that is compelling or serious or actually-radical in any of these positions in these particular formulations, unless they are intended as essentially aesthetic interventions (of which I heartily approve, but in their proper precinct).

Maybe you are right after all in drawing these connections between the infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies of Robot Cultists and a politics of state-smashing and post-gender declarations -- I can't say that I find much that is compelling or serious or actually-radical in any of these positions in these particular formulations, unless they are intended as essentially aesthetic interventions (of which I heartily approve, but in their proper precinct).

At last a bit of honesty. As I initially articulated, our political differences neatly align with our assessments of the value of transhumanism. My long-term goal isn't merely a pleasant welfare state with humble and enlightened bosses, though I'll happily work with you and other progressives to that end. I want a world without hierarchy and inequality. Basic income isn't enough; everyone must have equal access to consumption. The gender distinction itself functions as a form of oppression and needs to go. There's nothing inherently wrong with wish-fulfillment fantasies; if you don't know what you seek you'll never find it.

What a despicable thing to say. When have I been dishonest with you? My time is limited and I've been incredibly generous with it engaging with you.

Perhaps I didn't initially grasp how utterly unserious by my lights (I cheerfully admit that these standards are my own) your version of radicalism is in areas other than your Robot Cultism and so I thought an appeal to what I expected were more realistic democratic and feminist political assumptions might bring you back from the brink of your Robot Cultism so you might do some good in the world. Apparently, for now at any rate, I was wrong.

Basic income (for me one leg of a tripod also including basic healthcare and lifelong access to education, training, and reliable information) together with actually democratically accountable constituted authorities ensures that people can actually consent in an informed nonduressed way to the terms of their cultural/prosthetic self-determination, peer to peer, and that there are ongoing checks on the vulnerability to abuses inherent in the institution of alternatives for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes arising inevitably out of plurality.

The great conundrum of the democratic left in my view is the ongoing negotiation of the paradoxical dynamic of valuing both equity and diversity, a dynamism I prefer to denote as a kind of circuit: equity-in-diversity. Your declaration that basic income is not enough followed by your rejection of any distinction articulated by what might pass for a performance of gender both suggest to me that you have valued equity to the cost of diversity, to the eventual cost of tyranny.

In my view (and again I am carefully and respectfully informing you of the assumptions that lead to my eventual assertions, although this performance is little likely to forestall the usual whining that I am simply indulging in name-calling) [one] to pine for the dis-invention rather than the democratization of the state seems to me a recipe for chaos and tyranny masquerading as concern for injustice, [two] to pine for the dis-invention of sex-gender altogether rather than for its more capacious re-elaboration through subversive citations of its norms seems to me an evasion of the problem of patriarchy masquerading as an intervention in it, [three] to pine for techno-transcendence rather than for democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle to ensure that the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change are equitably distributed to the diversity of their stakeholders seems to me to indulge in wish-fulfillment fantasies masquerading as consensus science and serious science policy.

I can provide arguments to explain each of these assertions and then arguments to explain each of the assertions on which these themselves rest, I can recapitulate the long chains of reasoning that bring me to this place... but are you worth this trouble? Have you shown yourself to be a serious person who warrants that kind of attention? My students pay me for the privilege of education, you know, what is in it for me in your case? These are fairly settled areas of discussion for me from which I am not likely to benefit much from an interlocutor on the basics. Is this the moment when I face the fact that you are just wasting my time? The fact that you are a Robot Cultist in the first place does not speak well for your judgment, I'm sorry to say. For now, let me just say that you will find many basic political formulations of mine under the heading The Politics of Design and p2p-Democratization and for a better sense of my feminist perspective I really recommend that you read Judith Butler's Undoing Gender among other works.

You're absolutely right; I apologize. I should have said, "Now we're finally seeing eye to eye."

Your declaration that basic income is not enough followed by your rejection of any distinction articulated by what might pass for a performance of gender both suggest to me that you have valued equity to the cost of diversity, to the eventual cost of tyranny.

Nonviolent anarchism cannot turn into tyranny without abandoning its essential properties. Basic income with the capitalist system intact previous a class of masters.

[one] to pine for the dis-invention rather than the democratization of the state seems to me a recipe for chaos and tyranny masquerading as concern for injustice

I support democratization for the short term but refuse to renounce abolition as the ideal. To predict chaos and tyranny if we do away with masters is the classic statist view; there's nothing remotely new about this conflict.

[two] to pine for the dis-invention of sex-gender altogether rather than for its more capacious re-elaboration through subversive citations of its norms seems to me an evasion of the problem of patriarchy masquerading as an intervention in it

The abolition of gender merely means removing that category as meaningful way of sorting people. It's well-established in feminist and gender scholarship; I'm sure your familiar with the details. A parallel argument exists for abolishing race. I don't understand the reasons for maintaining the conceptual tools of oppression, but as long as white male supremacy gets atomized the difference doesn't terribly worry me.

My students pay me for the privilege of education, you know, what is in it for me in your case?

Comments like this one reaffirm my commitment smash the academy as well. Anarchist critiques of eduction hit spot on.

These are fairly settled areas of discussion for me from which I am not likely to benefit much from an interlocutor on the basics.

On anarchism and radical feminism, I feel the same way. You have influenced my view of transhumanism and I appreciate that. However, I think we should have agreed to disagree a while ago. Note that I don't consider my position objectively or demonstratively superior in any sense. Both anarchism and liberal democracy have a long history of failing to bring about revolutionary change. There are no good choices in this life. I wish you the best on your path and will continue to refer people to criticism of transhumanism for as long as I'm involved with the movement.

I really recommend that you read Judith Butler's Undoing Gender among other works.

Yes, it's clear that we are talking past one another here in consequence of all the telescoping of complex chains of reasoning into digestably blog-sized bits. I am completely committed to anti-sexist and anti-racist work, and will recommend Butler's Undoing Gender and Gilroy's Against Race as texts of which I strongly approve on these questions.

That's discouraging for both practical and ideological reasons. My main job prospects sadly involve being in a position of authority over students. I hope I can avoid identification with master class even as I become part of it, but we'll see.

But only liberal democracy has much of a history managing to bring about reforms for the better, whatever its limitations.

I would say that primarily the combination of defiant revolutionaries on the street and liberal democracy in government has a history of producing positive change. What meaningful reforms have come without my kind of people? Anarchism's apogee in the United States directly preceded the New Deal. Europe's tendency toward welfare states comes alongside a venerable and continuing tradition of powerful radical organizing. Liberals often characterize anarchists as providing a useful function despite being hopeless idealistic and naive. You say you've taught anarchism, so perhaps this approximates your view.